Dry pastel portraits rarely aim for optical fidelity; instead, they privilege surface, temperament, and the frictions between pigment and ground. “Dali” organizes these priorities around a head-and-shoulders likeness that feels at once recognizably “Dali” and deliberately unfinal—an image suspended between remembered portraiture and expressive invention. The work is inspired by many photographic portraits of artist, Salvador Dali, … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – Dali
T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – La Foule Québécoise: Cinq
The painting presents a compressed, portrait-like image built from two predominant vertical forms—left and right—framed by a warm field of ochres and yellows. Rather than constructing a fully naturalistic figure, the work cultivates an emblematic presence: a lack of eyes becomes the most legible of “features,” a face encircled by a thick, dark contour that … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – La Foule Québécoise: Cinq
T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – La Foule Québécoise: Quatre
This painting presents five standing figures rendered with a deliberate, flattened figural logic: human bodies are reduced to tall verticals, simplified silhouettes, and frontal—almost emblematic—poses. Their heads, each contained within a dark oval, are simultaneously present and withheld. Facial features are minimal to nonexistent, so that the work does not ask the viewer to identify … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – La Foule Québécoise: Quatre
T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – La Foule Québécoise: Trois
The painting centers on a solitary, front-facing figure—helmeted in darkness, simplified into near-iconic contours—set against a field of highly charged, slanting color. The overall effect suggests a stylistic convergence: the handling of the background recalls the velocity and fractured rhythm of modernist abstraction, while the figure’s reductive silhouette and masklike facial treatment evoke the hieratic … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – La Foule Québécoise: Trois
T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – La Foule Québécoise: Deux
The painting presents a paradoxical figure-ground relationship: a luminous human form emerges at the right, yet the surrounding space refuses stable depth, collapsing into a field of gestural colour. This visual strategy—recognizable as a hybrid of expressionistic figuration and painterly abstraction—positions the work between likeness and atmosphere. The result is not a portrait in the … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – La Foule Québécoise: Deux
T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – La Foule Québécoise: Un
The composition presents itself as a deliberately hybrid surface—part pictorial scene, part textual artifact, and part emblematic portrait. Its dominant field of burnt-orange and vermilion functions less as “background” than as an ideological climate: a warm, saturated plane that is scratched, rubbed, and worked with visible texture, suggesting a process-oriented practice in which meaning accrues … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – La Foule Québécoise: Un
T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – The Harshness of My Gaze
The piece presents a frontal, iconic figure—rendered through a limited but high-contrast palette of smoky gray, soot-like black, and weathered earth tones—whose material surface is as legible as the image itself. The face is built from abrasions, scorings, and accumulated marks that resemble abrasion in stone, the patina of time, or the residue of repeated … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – The Harshness of My Gaze
T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – The Discovery of My Reflection
This work presents a roughly delimited, frontal portrait emerging from a field of scraped, mottled substrate—its battered edges and visible abrasions doing as much compositional work as the painted figure itself. The face is modeled with compressed planes rather than blended anatomy: dark contours define the brow, nose, and mouth, while the skin reads through … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – The Discovery of My Reflection
T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – Deconstructing My Self-Image
This work presents a head-and-shoulders figure rendered as if emerging from a damaged surface—an image constructed less by “painting a likeness” than by assembling traces. The face is articulated through high-contrast black lines and scumbled greys that resemble charcoal or soot, while the field behind the head is worked like a palimpsest: layered greens, ochres, … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Art Reviews – Deconstructing My Self-Image
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is one of those rare picture books that functions simultaneously as a fable, a miniature psychological drama, and a radical experiment in economy — of line, of colour, and of words. On the surface it tells the simple story of a child’s temper and imaginative flight; beneath that … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak